Ah, nice. Swedish tanks is the best thing that has happened to WoT, thanks. I appreciate the documentary video too. One little thing I want to point out, in the video Kranvagn is called Kranwagen wich is German. Kranvagn is Swedish. The languages are similar (same germanic origin) but not the same.

WoT is first and foremost a game and while it is based on historical fact, ultimately the most important thing is to have a balanced game that everyone can enjoy. The Swedish tanks have great turret armor so they can be used in hull down positions.

I love how it is both historical, and unhistorical at the same time.

WG used to say, that they use historical values if they exist or are available. They said, this is the reasony why E-100's penetration is weak. Okay I accepted it.

Then new branches came with fake penetration values, because with real ones, they wouldn't fit into the game. Penetration became balance parameter, yet E-100 is still the same.

I have no clue, how you can even mention the word historical, when the guys who volunteered and looked up the blueprints exclaimed that they are very disappointed how their work into the Swedish tech-tree was completely customized for and by marketing purposes, basically ruining all their effort. I'm frankly sad, what this game is becoming. From pay to win clown premiums to the unhistorical-historical tanks... I miss the good old beta days, when the game was actually less, but also more in some aspects...

The main problem with the 15 cm cannon wasn't the gun itself, but the ammunition. Kinetic penetrators (KP) was considered a thing of the past given the rapid development of the HEAT-technology, which was the natural choice for a brand new tank system (hence the large calibre, as the power of the HEAT-round is a direct function of the diameter) to be built.

HEAT-rounds have some problems though:

* In order to detonate properly at a target, the fuse must be exact enough to ignite the hollow charge at a precise distance from the armour. This is getting increasingly difficult with higher projectile speeds, so the Vo (velocity measured when the projectile just clears the muzzle) deliberately had to be kept low (500-800 m/s) for the fuses to function.

* This in turn means that for longer distances, the trajectory becomes much higher than for a faster projectile, meaning the flight time becomes much longer than the mere difference in Vo between a KP and a HEAT-round suggest. Long flight times makes it a lot harder to hit a moving target...which everyone playing derp-gun and artillery can confirm.

* Finally, the HEAT-rounds (just like HESH) doesn't like getting spun around, or rather, the centripetal forces will lower the penetration. This causes severe problems in a gun relying on spinning the shell for stabilisation.

The Swedish military naturally wanted a reliable shell with good penetration, precision and short flight time at a reasonable cost per shell.

These simple demands proved to be insurmountable for the Bofors engineers. If the flight time was to be kept short, the velocity had to increase, which made the fuses unreliable. Getting good penetration with a rifled gun was difficult due to the spin, and with a smooth bore gun the lack of stabilisation made the precision suffer. Improving the fuses and adding a ball-bearing allowing the outer casing to rotate around the inner HEAT-charge and stabilise the projectile while giving full penetration would have made the shells prohibitorily expensive (15-50 times the cost of a normal HEAT.shell) to stock for war time use, never mind exercises.

Without a working shell, the gun couldn't go into final design, nor could the auto-loading system. Those in turn were the determining factor for the final design of the turret, so hence it was never made. Bofors could of course have made a more realistic mock-up, but that would just have been a waste of resources as all machinery would have to be re-tooled once the final designs were in.

WoT is first and foremost a game and while it is based on historical fact, ultimately the most important thing is to have a balanced game that everyone can enjoy. The Swedish tanks have great turret armor so they can be used in hull down positions.

If this was the case, why wasn't the TD-line adjusted once it became clear that the change in the over-match mechanics would be cancelled?

Why was the turret moved backwards so clipping issues caused the gun depression to be lowered?

WoT is first and foremost a game and while it is based on historical fact, ultimately the most important thing is to have a balanced game that everyone can enjoy. The Swedish tanks have great turret armor so they can be used in hull down positions.

Always a lovely argument but unfortunately that kite doesn't fly.

If you don't have artillery in your match the Kran can sit in impunity on a ridge and keep unloading into you because the turret weakspots are so tiny that it's actually a bigger problem than the T110E5 at the moment.

Don't talk about balance when your sit there in your Maus ( supposed to be the most heavily armoured heavy tank in the game) and get completely wrecked because your super armour is in fact quite terrible, especially compared to the armour on the T110E5 and now this abomination.

The Kran could have easily worked with the historical armour layout since it would still be relatively invulnerable to lower tiers but not so much against T9-T10 tanks.

The current "balance" of this vehicle is simply the ever returning WG trick of making new top of the line tanks (borderline) OP so that the maximum amount of people use free XP/gold (money) to get them and then when that stream dries up (after 2-3 patches) you make it truly balanced.

WoT is first and foremost a game and while it is based on historical fact, ultimately the most important thing is to have a balanced game that everyone can enjoy. The Swedish tanks have great turret armor so they can be used in hull down positions.

I can really enjoy getting rekt by a Kran in hull down position, not being able to make a dent in his armor. I get it.

What would have been wrong with historical accurate armor? It would have make it a bit better than 50B armor wise. Wouldn't that make the tank balanced? Now it is OP, like Cobra said, hull down with no arty you can't touch it. O yeah and flanking is out of the question in most maps since it is world of corridors.

But as said before, if it would have been just another 50b replica or something similar not much fuss would have been made of it and free exp would not fly out like it is now.

The current "balance" of this vehicle is simply the ever returning WG trick of making new top of the line tanks (borderline) OP so that the maximum amount of people use free XP/gold (money) to get them and then when that stream dries up (after 2-3 patches) you make it truly balanced.

Cobra 6

No Cobra, WG just wants to make it balanced

Hope I will remember his post 2 patches donw the line when the kran will get nerfed so ask if it is not balanced anymore?

New OP prem tanks made it into the game while old ones are obsolete and WG shows them no love, but hey the suckers already got them so whats the point of bringing them to an ok-ish level now.

And then they went and bought Centurions, the fools as WG has showed us how rubbish those tanks are ... no wait, in RL it was actually the best tank of it's time, funny how that doesn't apply to WG revisionist view of history.